Amy’s uncle remembers his first golfing trip to Scotland. On the first tee he asked the caddie, “What do the Scots call a mulligan?” The reply was brutally honest – “We call it two strokes!”
Today’s Gospel text is a mulligan text. It opens with the words, “In those days” (Matthew 3:1) which is a classic Old Testament way of introducing a new beginning. Then comes a call to repentance (“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” vs 2) which literally means to turn one’s life around or reorient oneself to God – a new way of living and of seeing. And this assumes, of course, that God’s forgiveness is right there, awaiting us, revealing God to be a God of new beginnings.
Then comes Matthew’s account of John the Baptist quoting Isaiah 40:3, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’” (vs. 3). However, this quotation has a particular context – it is Second Isaiah, directed towards the return of God’s people from exile in Babylon, back home to Jerusalem. A new beginning for God’s people in the land given to them by God. A new beginning in the Holy City.
John is located in the Judean wilderness, which begins south-east of Jerusalem and runs down to the Dead Sea – the lowest point on Earth. This is, as one scholar points out, a life lived at the margins – geographical, social, political, and religious. (It’s not the end of the world, but you can see the end of the world from there, as the old joke puts it!) Yet contrary to the way of the world, in which the margins must of necessity come to the center of power, influence and bureaucracy, this new world being ushered in by Jesus and proclaimed by John has the center moving to the margins, where it finds the kingdom of heaven, the new beginning.
The final section of John the Baptist’s message can sound quite scary – winnowing fork and all. And yes, this is an image of judgement, but also one of hope. And this hope rests at the heart of the new beginning in Jesus Christ.
Now we can see why the Second Sunday in Advent is focused so powerfully on John the Baptist: he is the one who, as scholars have pointed out, straddles the old age and the new age; the way the world was and the way it is to be; the world which is dying, that which finds its new beginning.
